addbadsec

- map out defective disk blocks

Synopsis

addbadsec [-p] [-ablkno [blkno]...] [-ffilename] raw_device

Description

addbadsec is used by the system administrator to map out bad disk
blocks. Normally, these blocks are identified during surface analysis, but occasionally the
disk subsystem reports unrecoverable data errors indicating a bad block. A block number
reported in this way can be fed directly into addbadsec, and the
block will be remapped. addbadsec will first attempt hardware remapping. This is supported
on SCSI drives and takes place at the disk hardware level. If
the target is an IDE drive, then software remapping is used. In order
for software remapping to succeed, the partition must contain an alternate slice
and there must be room in this slice to perform the mapping.

It should be understood that bad blocks lead to data loss. Remapping
a defective block does not repair a damaged file. If a bad
block occurs to a disk-resident file system structure such as a superblock, the
entire slice might have to be recovered from a backup.

Options

The following options are supported:

-a

Adds the specified blocks to the hardware or software map. If more than one block number is specified, the entire list should be quoted and block numbers should be separated by white space.

-f

Adds the specified blocks to the hardware or software map. The bad blocks are listed, one per line, in the specified file.

-p

Causes addbadsec to print the current software map. The output shows the defective block and the assigned alternate. This option cannot be used to print the hardware map.

Operands

The following operand is supported:

raw_device

The address of the disk drive (see FILES).

Files

The raw device should be /dev/rdsk/c?[t?]d?p0. See disks(1M) for an explanation of SCSI
and IDE device naming conventions.

See Also

Notes

The format(1M) utility is available to format, label, analyze, and repair SCSI
disks. This utility is included with the addbadsec, diskscan(1M), fdisk(1M), and fmthard(1M)
commands available for x86. To format an IDE disk, use the DOS
"format" utility; however, to label, analyze, or repair IDE disks on x86 systems,
use the Solaris format(1M) utility.